One of the striking developments in computational linguistics in recent years has been the rapid progress in the automatic analysis of text. This is especially so where the extraction of semantic content is concerned. The adoption of statistical, corpus-based techniques within natural language processing, the continued development of information extraction techniques, and the emergence of more effective algorithms for extracting particular aspects of linguistic and discourse structure have largely driven such progress. Effective applications have become a reality in a variety of fields, such as machine translation and automatic summarization, due to the progress of automated text analysis applications.